Across Canada by Story

by Douglas Gibson

  Archibald Belaney/Grey Owl (1888–1938)

  The Grey Owl story is stranger than fiction. We now know that he was an English lad who became fascinated by Canada’s First Nations people, and came to settle in Northern Ontario at the age of seventeen. In due course he invented an impressive background as the son of a Scot and an Apache mother. He married an Iroquois woman named Anahareo and adopted the name Grey Owl, along with the long hair and the buckskins that became his trademark. His first book was published by Macmillan in 1931, and Men of the Last Frontier became a huge success. Then, encouraged by his wife, the former trapper became a spokesman for conservation, as well as the needs and desires of his people. He worked out west on conservation programs in Riding Mountain National Park and Prince Albert National Park, the setting for three other books: Pilgrims of the Wild (1934), The Adventures of Sajo and Her Beaver People (1935), and Tales of an Empty Cabin (1936).

  On the lecture circuit he was a huge success, touring Canada, the United States, and Europe as the personification of everyone’s romantic dreams of “the noble Red Man.” In England, at Leicester, his talk on the need for conservation had a huge effect on two young brothers in short pants in the audience, Richard and David Attenborough. In London, he was even received by the King and Queen and the little princesses at Buckingham Palace, which did his reputation no harm.

  His stirring oratory as “the custodian of the ancient dignities of the Indian people of Canada” took everyone in. (Except, I must record, Morley Callaghan, who told me that when he was reverently introduced to this other Macmillan author, he “knew right away that this guy wasn’t an Indian.”) But with rare exceptions like Morley, everyone swooned before him, and accepted him as a spokesman for Native people. Amazingly, other Native people seemed to accept him. Here’s John Gray’s account of a lecture by Grey Owl at the King Edward Hotel, where the speaker had magically evaded John’s guiding arm outside the Crystal Ballroom.

  As I approached the doors I could see that the room was crowded and still. On the platform Grey Owl, who it seemed to me now must have entered by the roof, was just beginning. Over at one side sat an Indian whose bare copper arms and shoulders gleamed beautifully above a purple blanket draped gracefully around him. Grey Owl introduced him as his friend Little Beaver from the St. Regis reservation, and Little Beaver, standing up, unsmiling, raised his hand palm outward in the ancient and dignified greeting.

  Later, John Gray puzzled over this support.

  I was one of those who didn’t, couldn’t, believe the exposé. As for the conclusion that he was a fake, a con artist, I could only weakly disagree; what about the Indians, like Little Beaver, who gathered around him wherever he went? Out of loneliness or admiration they had hunted him out in the cities where he was lecturing and together they would have long talks about their problems, and then try to forget them in dances up and down hotel corridors to the beat of skin drums, and the terror of other guests.

  Even his biographer, “Rache” Lovat Dickson, a lean Albertan who had forged an impressive career in the London publishing world and had worked with Grey Owl, found his real identity hard to believe. I knew Rache, the author of Wilderness Man, in his retirement years in Toronto, and he always seemed to be, metaphorically, still shaking his head in disbelief at the universal success of Archie Belaney’s fraud, especially with himself.

  As for Macmillan, the company stayed loyal. The front lobby, right beside the tiny elevator, continued to display a fine copper etching of the noble “red” man, and in my day we continued to sell his books by the thousands. I may even have had a hand in updating the cover copy for the paperbacks, especially as the world caught up to the good sense of his conservation message.

  I remember that his wife, Anahareo, and their daughter, Dawn, once dropped in to see someone at the Macmillan building, which meant me. They were very pleased to find the plaque still on display, and I was thrilled to meet this distinguished, gentle old lady, a link with a storied past. I was amused when the movie world, always fascinated by larger-than-life heroes, persuaded pale-faced Pierce Brosnan to play Archie Belaney in the 1999 movie Grey Owl, directed by a somewhat older Richard Attenborough.

  At the Giller Prize dinner in 2014 I asked Tom King, the thoughtful writer about aboriginal-white relations in Canada, what he made of Grey Owl’s popularity. Tom noted that in Grey Owl’s time white Canadians were very clearly keen to hear from the aboriginal side, but in this particular conversation “had no idea that they were just talking to themselves.”

  I should explain that if you’re the editor or publisher of a famous publishing company based in downtown Toronto, you’re likely to find the world coming to your door. Sometimes the visitors are welcome, like Anahareo, or the great western historian James H. Gray, who wanted to show his grandson around his publishing house. That went well, but when Donald Jack (the author of The Bandy Papers series of comic novels) did the same thing, in the hope of impressing his visiting daughter, fate intervened. When I threw open the boardroom door — “And this is where we make our publishing decisions” — the two visitors walked in, then recoiled, squealing. Barring the way on the sober green carpet was a moist dog turd, artistically coiled.

  I explained that this was not a usual part of the editorial discussion setting (or in any way an editorial comment on any book under consideration), and the embarrassed assistant who had brought her sick dog into work soon cleaned it up. But it was life imitating art, with Donald Jack experiencing a blundering Bartholomew Bandy moment.

  Sometimes total strangers (such as “Mr. Brown,” alias Igor Gouzenko) managed to talk their way in to see me. I remember one woman, very smartly dressed, whose writing desk at home had been cunningly wired by CIA agents to administer electric shocks whenever she wrote a sentence that criticized their country. I remember, too (and the common theme of administering jolts had never occurred to me until now) an enthusiastic middle-aged man with a Dutch accent who promised to write a book for me about his recent discovery of a surefire way for a man to bring his female sex partners to ecstatic heights “Every time! Every single time!”

  Unfortunately shyness — or possibly fear that I would steal his successful formula, and become rich, and very, very popular — prevented him from revealing his secret, at least until I had given him a lot of money to put it on paper. I regret that his formula remains secret to this day, making the world a less exciting place.

  Stories from the distant past cluster around that building. When Mazo de la Roche was a young writer, her worldwide success with Jalna (1927) far in the future, she was thrilled to receive an invitation to visit Hugh Eayrs, then the publisher at Macmillan, at 70 Bond Street. She was so flustered and excited that she failed to dress with her usual care. When the great man ushered her into his office and offered to take her coat she remembered that she was still wearing a ratty old sweater to protect her good dress. So she politely declined his offer, saying that, no, thank you, she preferred to keep her coat on. As their conversation continued, she became uncomfortably hot. When Hugh Eayrs slipped out of the office to get a book for her, she tore off the coat, then the sweater, rushed to the window overlooking Bond Street, opened it wide, and tossed the sweater out. She had just regained her chair when Eayrs returned, saying, “What a pretty dress.”

  When the time came for her to leave the building, going down the steps, she furtively looked around for her sweater. It had gone. Bond Street, you see, has always been on the edge of a seedy part of town.

  A number of prime ministers, current and former, strode up those Bond Street steps. I remember John Diefenbaker visiting the office in 1974 to launch the first volume of his autobiography. When we shook hands he didn’t mention that he remembered me as the youth who had sat down so crushingly on his wife’s fragile straw hat.

  Once, before my time, the building was visited by a British prime minister and the owner of the company, Harold Macmillan. I’m told
that in honour of his impending visit the operator of the tiny elevator was presented with a smart new blazer instead of his usual greasy sweater. The elevator guy’s hard life involved slow horses and medium-paced women, and when Macmillan arrived the fancy blazer was gone, never to return. When the lordly visitor from London departed in his limo, the over-awed staff lined the windows overlooking the street, confident that their time in the spotlight was over. Yet with a politician’s instinct, he turned for a last wave, and they all ducked beneath the windows, slowly popping back up again like shy, embarrassed gophers. What this meant for relations between Britain and Canada is not recorded.

  The most unfortunate case, as I’ve told elsewhere, was that of Canada’s prime minister Mackenzie King. As he left the building he announced that he wanted to go next door, to pay his respects to the former home of his ancestor, William Lyon Mackenzie. (The house is still there, in fine condition as a museum, well worth a visit.) The bachelor prime minister was not aware, as his appalled companions were, that the house had fallen on hard times and was now occupied by, ahem, ladies of easy virtue. As the prime minister stood reverently on the sidewalk outside his ancestor’s house, one of the ladies, eager to coax him out of this shy hesitation, opened the window and invited him in, with very explicit promises. The prime minister’s group departed at high speed.

  Mackenzie King was not a notable ladies’ man. William Toye learned that his author, Norah Story, had accompanied the prime minister on a number of formal dates in Ottawa. How romantic was he, the mischievous Toye asked? Not very. The most romantic thing he ever said to her was that she “had eyes like Mussolini.”

  Just down Bond Street, on the east side, stands St. Michael’s Cathedral, a replica of Salisbury Cathedral, but with no cows grazing around it. That was the setting for one of Canada’s greatest literary funerals, when the formal High Mass for Morley Callaghan ended with an uplifting outbreak of Dixieland jazz. “Just a Closer Walk With Thee” and “St. James Infirmary Blues” pealed out from a band concealed above the cathedral doors as we all moved through them out to Bond Street.

  Yonge Street just north of Dundas has a distinctly raunchy side to it, especially just north of where Sam the Record Man hung his historic sign. After a late evening at the office I was once passing one of the strip clubs there (perhaps Zanzibar Club) when a friendly female voice called out “Hey, Doug!” It came from a good-looking young woman, lightly dressed in what looked like a dressing gown, who was enjoying a smoke in the warm summer air just outside the club. She seemed familiar and, yes, it was “Denise!” I knew her as a nice girl who had worked in the Doubleday warehouse. She told me that, you know, working as a stripper here paid much better than the job in publishing, and I really should come in and see the show. When I pleaded that I had to get home to my wife, she told me that I should bring her along to the show, too, for a night out sometime. We never got around to it, and I’m sorry about that. I’m also sorry that I lost touch with “Denise,” who was both bright and good-looking, and shy in a way that was the opposite of brash and brassy. I hope that life has treated her well.

  Opposite the strip club section lies Elm Street, which houses the ancient white Barberian’s Steak House. There, in the Cold War 1960s, the legendary Toronto Star cartoonist Duncan Macpherson found the Russian ambassador dining with his bodyguards. Their table was laden with baked potatoes and heavy steaks and capitalist, rich, red wine. Duncan, a great enthusiast when he had a few drinks under his belt, insisted happily (“No, just sit where you are!”) on showing his friend the ambassador his new party trick, where he took hold of the white table cloth, like this, and with a sudden pull whisked it right out from beneath all the … It did not go well, and Duncan had to make a hasty retreat, before the bodyguards’ guns appeared.

  Across the street stands the Arts and Letters Club, a fine old dark red-brick building from pre-war Toronto … as in pre-1914. The club still actively honours its artistic and literary legacy, but its heyday was a century ago when it was the Toronto hangout for Tom Thomson and the artists of the Group of Seven, as recorded by historic club photographs.

  On the main floor, past the comfortable Members’ Bar, there is a grand, dark, wood-panelled room, a sort of mediaeval banquet hall (decorated with whimsical coats of arms for original members), with a stage at the end. This hall is the venue for club lunches and dinners, and occasional theatrical performances. And this was where my own stage show was born in the spring of 2011, under the encouraging direction of Mike Spence. Indeed, this was where I gave the very first public performance, before an audience. That audience was politely encouraging, although I learned the useful lesson that an intermission will always take its toll on attendance. But it was a very good place to start a long journey.

  In mid-winter it is foolhardy for a Canadian author to plan to do much travelling, so after 2011, I devoted myself in those snowy months to visiting local venues, such as churches, libraries, or clubs. They all were interesting places to visit, like the ancient National Club on Bay Street (not far from the corner of King and Bay, and across the street from the best downtown bookstore, Ben McNally Books,where I launched my book); or the Heliconian Club, a historic club for women interested in the arts that’s based in a fine old wooden building (the former Olivet Baptist Church) in Yorkville; or the Women’s Art Association, also based in a fine old wooden building, of clapboard as if from the South End of Halifax, but just west of Yorkville.

  I also “played” the Badminton and Racquet Club, and the Cricket, Skating and Curling Club. Fortunately, no cricket was in progress, so I had no nightmarish memories of the cricketing disaster in Scotland when my swift, athletic throw in the field, a thing of balletic beauty, felled the knee-capped umpire and set the Perth crowd threatening a field invasion. “UMPIRE HURT AT NORTH INCH” was the local paper’s headline, and it was a good reason for me to escape to Canada.

  The most hip location was the Green Door nightclub, way west on Ossington, where cool new restaurants now sit alongside cigar factories and auto repair shops. My friend (and for a time my theatre agent, as he was for the Stuart McLean) Bob Missen arranged a Sunday afternoon show at the Green Door, where I perched on a bar stool to give my show to forty-five brave, paying customers.

  But I remember most vividly my visit to the York Club. That is, the York Club of Eric Arthur, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Robertson Davies. It’s the mysterious red Romanesque building — all arched windows and carved sandstone and turrets beneath rich shingles — set grandly back on its own grounds from the corner of Bloor Street and St. George, beside the subway station. In his classic 1964 book, Toronto: No Mean City, Eric Arthur, the famous professor of architecture, wrote about the astonishing interior of the club, which had originally been a private mansion belonging to the Gooderham family, and was full of magnificent woodcarving details: “Standing in the hall or reading room, one does not feel the presence of the original owner and his family so much as those humble craftsmen who wrought with such skill and apparent delight the woodwork in mantels, stairs and trim in a variety of woods,” which, he recalled, the visiting Frank Lloyd Wright especially admired.

  Because the club lies close to Massey College, Robertson Davies was a regular visiting member. (One friend, Mark McLean, tells of finding him reading Vogue magazine there; when challenged about this he noted simply that it had “by far the best horoscopes.”) When the omens were good, he used to take me to lunch there. We would begin with a drink in one of the turret rooms and then proceed (perhaps the word is “process”) through the ancient panelled hallways to the dining room. That dining room is the setting for a scene in R.D.’s final novel, The Cunning Man (1994):

  Thus it was that we three got together at my club, the York Club, a famous refuge of the beleaguered well-to-do, and dined in the handsome dark chamber where a few others were eating and engaging in muted conversations. I had feared that talk might be difficult, but it flowed freely. …

/>   A little too freely, in fact, as secrets begin to emerge from the two men who are dining with the woman whose affections they have shared. Voices are raised, until the ultimate York Club offence becomes a danger.

  “The people at other tables are beginning to glance this way,” said Brocky. “Pipe down, Nuala, this isn’t your club and you may get Jon a bad name here. Rowdy guests.”

  The guests were not rowdy the night that I performed my show after dinner at the York Club, and I was pleased to be introduced to the assembled “beleaguered well-to-do” by my lawyer, Aaron Milrad, and to see that my old friend Betty Kennedy had brought along a table of friends. Betty wrote two books for me, including an account of Hurricane Hazel, the 1952 storm that reshaped so much of Toronto’s landscape. Betty, always gracious, remains a good friend. Her outdoor swims in her Campbellville pool go on later than seems shiver-free, but for a veteran of Front Page Challenge, perhaps “First Frost Challenge” is nothing.

  Just south of the York Club, hidden away in an alley, lies the legendary Coach House Press. Under Stan Bevington — bright-eyed, and fiercely bearded like a circuit-riding Methodist preacher six generations ago — it occupied an honoured place in the small press world, which was far from my own Big Bond Street Publisher experience. Michael Ondaatje came out of — and is still very loyal to — that world, and he retains links with his friends at Coach House. He was also a filmmaker (one of his films was The Clinton Show about, yes, Alice Munro’s town). And after great success with a number of prize-winning poetry collections he became a novelist, with Coming Through Slaughter in 1976. But he really hit his stride in 1987 with In the Skin of a Lion.